Nearly a third of jet passengers “accidentally” leave electronics on

We all know the drill – when the flight attendants tell us to power down and stow our cell phones, tablets and MP3 players, we dutifully turn them off because leaving them on will cause safety and communications problems for the pilots.

After all, nobody wants to be known as the passenger who brought an entire jet down because he needed to get in just one more round of “Words With Friends.”

So here’s an interesting finding in a study released Thursday: 30 percent of airline passengers have reported “accidentally” leaving their electronic devices – mostly cell phones – on during a flight.

“The data in the study reveals important insights into actual passenger behavior, which we hope the FAA will find useful as it deliberates on this issue,” said Russell Lemieux, executive director of the Airline Passenger Experience Association, which co-sponsored the study with the Consumer Electronics Association.

The survey conducted in December found that use of PEDs (in this case, referring to personal electronics devices, not the performance enhancing drugs that got former Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera suspended from baseball last season) is rampant among airline travelers – 99 percent of all adult passengers carried at least one on board last year.

Of those, 69 percent used those devices, including smart phones, tablets, laptops, digital audio players and electronic readers, during the flight.

Usually, passengers complied with the regulations – 59 percent said they always turned their device completely off and 21 percent switch to “airplane mode.” But five percent said they only sometimes turned their PEDs completely off.

Then there were those nearly one-third who forgot to turn them off at all, and 61 percent of the time it was a smart phone.

Of course, the Consumer Electronics Association is a trade group with a vested interest in seeing its members selling more of their devices to airline travelers. But the study could be useful as federal regulators debate whether to relax rules on PEDs on jets.

Still, the results of another recent survey by the Travel Leaders Group found that 80 percent of Americans are against allowing cell phone calls during flights.

“Because so many planes are flying at near capacity and many passengers already feel a lack of personal space within the airplane cabin, it’s understandable that they want to continue to have some amount of peace and quiet whether they are on a short commuter flight or a flight that lasts several hours,” Travel Leaders CEO Barry Liben said in a news release.